Callaway Big Bertha B21 Hybrid Review

Name: Callaway Big Bertha B21 Hybrid Review
Brand: Callaway
Price: 229 GBP

Published: 18 August 2020

Inside the Callaway Big Bertha B21 hybrid.

Callaway's Big Bertha B21 hybrid has a new Flash Face.

The Callaway Big Bertha B21 hybrid's offset inspires confidence.

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What we say...

Callaway’s Big Bertha B21 looks set to be the ultimate super game-improvement hybrid.

While Tour pros continue to swing faster and hit the golf ball further, Callaway know that’s anything but the case for most club golfers, so they’ve launched the B21 family to help.

Like the rest of the new Big Bertha range, the B21 hybrid is designed to give clubs golfers “distance any way you swing it”, and Callaway say it’s the easiest to launch hybrid they’ve ever made.

The larger head and increased offset cannot fail to inspire confidence as you look down, with the forgiving design effectively taking the distance-sapping slice or big miss out of your game.

There’s also more speed across the improved Flash Face SS21 to help you make yards regardless of your strike location and your swing speed.

The Callaway Big Bertha B21 hybrid's offset inspires confidence.

What you need to know about the Callaway Big Bertha B21 hybrid

Straight and long

Callaway say the increased offset will help to reduce your distance-sapping slice or big miss, providing a straighter ball flight for more yards.

Packed with tech

Just like Callaway’s Mavrik, the B21 hybrid has Jailbreak bars behind the face, connecting the crown and sole to create maximum ball speed from whatever swing speed you can muster.

There’s also a stronger and lighter AI-designed titanium Flash Face to ensure distance even if you don’t catch it out of the centre.

70 grams of dual Tungsten weighting has been placed into the sole of the clubhead using MIM (Metal‐Injected Molding) to enhance your launch and trajectory.

Even more forgiveness and launch benefits coming from the significantly lighter T2C Carbon Crown, allowing weight to be redistributed.

Callaway's Big Bertha B21 hybrid has a new Flash Face.

Perfect combo

The hybrid is available from 3H (19 degrees) right through to 8H (33 degrees) to help everyone get the best from their golf.

Designed for you

Callaway’s new RCH shaft has been specifically designed for the B21 metalwoods.

A reasonably lightweight construction and an active tip section mean it naturally tries to add loft at impact, so shots are flighted higher to maximise carry. There’s also a specially selected new grip in Golf Pride’s Tour 360 Soft.

Callaway Big Bertha B21 hybrid.

We asked Dr Alan Hocknell, Callaway’s Head of R&D, for the story behind the Big Bertha B21 hybrid

Hybrids are still a relatively long club in the bag and they come with their own challenges. In particular, this idea inconsistent contact dominates. They have a relatively long shaft even if you’re hitting from the fairway or the tee and you often take them into the light rough and places where contact may not be easy to achieve.

We seen impacts from literally all over the face, so we looked at how we turn that into what people expect from a hybrid, which is an easy-to-launch characteristic with good distance and elevation and still landing relatively steeply, even when you don’t hit the club very consistently from the centre of the face.

RELATED: WITB – Dr Alan Hocknell

Similar to the iron, we’ve used AI to design the Face Cup and we make it work in tandem with our Jail Break technology which gives us a further enhancement in the way that we create speed from all over the face.

We have tungsten weighting, similar to the iron, but we have more of it in different places. And we have more room inside of a hybrid to use that weighting very effectively.

Then we can use the shape and size of a hybrid. Even within the hybrid category these are relatively larger hybrids which gives us an MOI, or forgiveness benefit. We’ve used the relationship between the face and shaft axis, the offset, differently to other Callaway hybrids to make it match the irons set.

Inside the Callaway Big Bertha B21 hybrid.

We’ve got more than 70g of tungsten in this hybrid. That’s something we learned from the Super Hybrid – how to use that much tungsten, where to put it, how to hold it so it didn’t do strange things like vibrate and create bad feel, how to get the most MOI advantage out of it and still keep the centre of gravity low so we have that ease of launch characteristic that is consistent with the irons and theme of this Bertha set.

RELATED: Callaway Mavrik hybrid review

In order to get to that 70g we had to take weight out of the crown so we have our T2C carbon crown, which only weighs five or six grams, which is great for replacing weight that would otherwise be high in the head and taking it low, again for that ease of launch.

The hybrid face is larger with a different aspect ratio to the irons so we optimised those very differently to the irons. There’s still a high priority on ball speed but maybe using less of the face in terms of controlling launch angle and spin the way that we try to in iron design.

We have a different thickness pattern, again by loft, but really with a higher priority on generating speed all over the face as we know that impact locations are all over the face.

The increased offset is there to change the hand to clubhead position, but also you see that this type of golfer wants to look down and feel confident. The way the offset frames the ball makes the golfer believe they’re going to hit it well. It’s really different to Mavrik Max.

I’d expect a lot of people who get fitted into Big Bertha iron sets to have a couple of hybrids anyway, but we see two, three or four hybrids and that brings the 8-hybrid into play. People ask why we make an 8-hybrid – it’s because people buy them.

It is a really fun club and is the sort of thing that can be transformational to certain golfers, hitting the club in a way that reliably gets elevation over water and sand, even on shots that are only 100-yards long, and still being able to land it on the green.

For other players it’s a really effective chipping club. All sorts of things.

The previous Big Bertha hybrid had an adjustable hosel but we really wanted to prioritise the ease of launch as a dominant characteristic, which meant getting a lot of weight down low and an adjustable hosel counters that by putting weight up high in the heel.

With the amount of models we have we felt adjustability wouldn’t be the right choice and once you put the offset in there it’s quite challenging to put the through-hole in there where the screw goes.